“Though some mass extinctions happen quickly, most take hundreds of thousands of years. So how would we know whether one was happening right now? The simple answer is that we can’t know for sure. What we do know for certain, however, is that mass extinctions have decimated our planet on a regular basis throughout its history. The Great Dying involved climate change similar to the one our planet is undergoing right now….”

Excerpted from Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, by Annalee Newitz..Excerpted for National Public Radio, by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher except by “fair use.” Which this is. So there.

I have been following all this noise about Mr. Gore’s inconvenient truth with interest, since it appears that the house of cards is starting to fall apart for the Climate Extremists. I mean, it hasn’t got measurably warmer in the better part of a couple decades, even with the relentless tinkering with the past temperature records. CO2, that demon trace gas, has inched up over 400 Parts per million and doesn’t seem to have the effects that the alleged scientists have been trumpeting since Paul Erhlich, the famous futurist, changed his mind about the next ice age being upon us and started worrying about the population bomb that you don’t hear much about anymore.

But just when you think common sense might be breaking out, I heard an assertive woman named Annalee Newitz talking about the great species die-off that is in progress right now, due to global warming.

She was the featured guest on Ira Flatow’s Science Friday on my local National Public Radio outlet.

Ms Newitz thinks the extinction could include us, so naturally my ears perked up. Of course, mass extinction is hardly news- there have been several of them in the historic record before, predating even the one that took the entire Whig Party.

All of them happened without benefit of human contribution, so this contention is sort of interesting. The old ones are attributed in some manner to really big external events, like gigantic meteor strikes and volcanic activity and other things I am going to put on the list of things to worry about, somewhere after the Government gets done screening my phone calls and checking my Facebook page for updates.

See, with the exception of the meteors, these mass events happen fairly slowly. So slowly that creatures such as us, who have the lifespans of the cosmic equivalent of mayflies, can’t even notice.

I am prepared to accept that- I know I am not even a blink in geologic terms. What struck me about this discussion was that although these things have clearly happened before, and probably will happen again, Ms Newitz is convinced that we humans are causing this one with our profligate use of fossil fuels, and if we don’t do something really radical right now, it will be really, really, bad.

Humans may not go extinct, she said, though the reduction in the human species from the six or seven billion to one, living in caves and eating algae.

It is all because of global warming, you see. Ms Newitz was perplexed by the opposition of the Deniers to the revealed, peer-reviewed truth.

Ira, the sage voice of Science and Progress, agreed with her readily about the sad state of discourse in which some troglodytes will not get with the program of saving the planet.

I had to scratch my head about that one, since while I think Ms Newitz and Mr. Flatow are nice people, they don’t know their ass from their elbow.

I saw recently that the nineteen most popular climate models- including Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann’s famously discredited “hockey stick”- do not appear to have much validity based on actual measurement of the temperature. Their narration of doom requires the application of computer science fueled with assumptions. Which appear to have some significant flaws.

Pointing that out gets you labeled with a nasty sort of nickname. Ms Newitz used it, and it stung: if I don’t buy what the wild-eyed climate scientists claim, I am a Denier.

I am not some sort of wild-eyed Iranian President who claims the Holocaust didn’t happen. I actually believe in global warming, though it is not much, and probably fairly reasonable, since we are, after all, in an interglacial period in the earth’s history. I do not believe in bad science, though, no matter how well it is rewarded by government grants that support discrete policy agendas.

The Alarmists are convinced that people like me are shills for Big Oil or the tobacco industry, when it is actually themselves who are slurping deep at the public trough. We have spent billions on research that, let’s be candid, only passed the gates of peer review if they came to the pre-agreed conclusion.

That isn’t science, my friends, that is fraud. They won’t give up, though, since the foundation of their educations and careers is based on a falsehood, I suppose I should not be surprised.

(Um…all those hockey stick graphics? They reflect models that are pretty obviously just flat wrong. This shows the 19 most popular models used by the UN’s Inter-govermental Panel on Climate Change and income redistribution (IPCC- IR). Of course it is getting modestly warmer, in fits and starts. If you started this in 1990, for example, the trend is precisely flat. Graph courtesy WUWT and Anthony Watts).

Of course it is getting a little warmer. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age. It is not ‘running away’ in any manner, and the assertion that it is requires ignoring the evidence of actual observation.

Sigh. I keep hoping this will collapse of its own weight, and eventually it will, I suspect, without apology. They will be off on some other really really disastrous thing that is going to happen in twenty or thirty years that we have to do something about right now. Or else.

I would ramble on, but there is a lot that needs to be done right here, and right now for other reasons. There is a bunch of stuff that is going on which involve unique challenges that I will tell you about sometime. I will, that is, if it doesn’t get too hot to talk about.

I may have to scatter, and adapt to the new situation.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com